In some quarters there seems to be a reluctance to acknowledge that railroads are in fact public roads. This has always been the case. Railroads have certain special rights but with those rights come responsibilities.
Railroads are privately owned and operated. They operate under common carrier law wherein the must transport whatever legal freight is offered to them. They are NOT public roads and other carriers cannot operate over one carriers tracks without the permission of the owning carrier. Amtrak has contracts with the carriers they operate over that specify who pays for what - without those contracts Amtrak would not be operating over freight railroads.
Cooperation isn’t the problem on the NEC. It’s FRA crash standards that make the equipment so heavy - and stop Amtrak from buying “off the shelf” European designs. The “buy American” requirements don’t help, either.
This is true if you accept that the FRA specs provide a measure of safety greater than their cost. I suspect they do not - or will not once we get into the “PTC world”, particularly on routes with few grade crossings like the NEC.
The “bang for the buck” for safety comes from figuring out how to avoid collisions, not how to survive them. Seems to work pretty well in Germany, et. al.
All the more reason to buy “off the shelf” from overseas…at least for now. Should passenger rail operations grow to be sufficient size to support a full time plant here, it will happen naturally. The “buy American” and, worse yet, “assemble in my state” laws add a ton of cost to these things.
Exactly. However, the Staggers Act greatly reduced rate regulations. That is why railroads are much better able to compete with trucks than they were prior to the Act.
Following incident is indicitave of what can happen in a crash - I am not saying FRA spec would have prevented the loss of life - but the forces involved in these kinds of incidents do not bode well for ‘lightly constructed’ equipment.
Well yes. But a railroad cannot be arbitrary and refuse to make such a contract with Amtrak. And, as you point out, they must transfer legal freight that is offered to them. I don’t mean they are public roads in the sense that I can put a little rail car on the tracks and go where I want as I can put my car on the road. But if push comes to shove they cannot refuse business which is offered to them.